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Obama’s last stand

What Obama needs to talk about in his “big speech” tomorrow
night is economy, not Afghanistan. What we need is a wartime economist. Like a
war president, but for the economy. The Punjab may be falling apart but so is
the American economy. The economy is the greater crisis and the people are
getting brittle.

The new push in Afghanistan is Obama’s second phase of
denial, healthcare being the first. He has the issues in complete reverse
priority. Healthcare first, he goes, then Afghanistan and then the economy. It
is just the opposite. Economy is first, the war second and healthcare last and
dependent on the outcome of the first two. That he claims now that he is going
to “finish this thing,” suggests he is reading that issue of GQ with his
picture on the cover and Admiral Mike Mullen’s happy face briefs. That this
comes at the critical moment when his approval has slipped to 45 percent
suggests the classic “patriotic war” so favored by Russian czars and commissars
to firm up peasant support. The language, “finish this thing,” is pure jive. No
one believes it and we are expected when we hear it to enter into that state of
agreeable disbelief and patronization that we use with children and innocents.
We do not treat children as equals. We do not treat innocents as adults.

But it is a very good day for Mitt Romney. If America wanted
a competent war manager she would have voted Romney in in 2008. This will
provide invaluable background and market research for him as he eyes 2012. And
it will do nothing but swell the Ron Paul ranks of the youngish Republicans; a
cake that is rising anyway.

The heartland insurgency which the Pauls, Ron and son Rand,
speak to is making the people brittle. Just two years ago it was all
middle-class fat and happy walking slowly across the Washington mall or the
college campus in a self-satisfied Starbucks-induced trance. Then last year the
victorious bliss with a new black president and nothing clouding the horizon
but pirates, bed bugs, a plague of suburban coyotes and that feral wolf girl
from Alaska who says she travels with God and Todd. Today we read in Peggy
Noonan’s Wall Street Journal column that there is no love for Obama among
Democrats, that questions of integrity are arising among his core professional
support and there is throughout “ . . . the growing perception of
incompetence.”

So it is getting brittle. Those very vulnerable mall
cultures and uptight exurbs — globalization’s transitory, disposable,
techno-societies — which seemed to spring up overnight out of the South’s red
clay, are beginning to feel the edge of a new rural angst. And they are blaming
it on the wolf girl.

Next year, the year after, things could actually start to
shred if Obama doesn’t find the path and head the economy in the right
direction. This president who so likes to be compared to Lincoln has been
misguided by Krugman & Co. The Keynesians have led him into the wilderness.
They are Obama’s George McClellan; stallers, busy-makers and in the end,
incompetents. He needs to fire them as Lincoln finally fired McClellan. He
needs to find an economist like Grant if he wants to be a Lincoln.

Worth noting this week when Obama speaks to our honored
soldiers to kick off his new campaign in Afghanistan, an item on page 20 of The
New York Times on Thanksgiving day. Ron Paul proved to be a “surprising”
presence in 2008, it said, and his son Rand is an “unexpected” candidate in the
2010 Senate race in Kentucky.

Surprising to whom? Unexpected by whom? Obama needs
professionals who are not surprised by the life’s predictable vagaries of sin
and joy. The fate of the republic depends on it.